Find journals in your field or a new subject area by searching appropriate subject databases, e.g. MLA Bibliography for articles on your topic. Note the journal titles!
Then search the database, MLA Directory of Periodicals.
The Bibliography is to find scholarly journal articles, book chapters, journals and books on literature, folklore and language.
The Directory of Periodicals is a directory of publication information about the journals which are indexed in the Bibliography. The Directory has facts about subscription figure and information on a journal's peer review process. It is a good place to learn about possible journals to submit one's article or gather a list of journals relevant to one's scholarly interests.
Some suggested sources for checking a journal's credentials:
UlrichsWeb
Provides detailed information on scholarly, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, and newsletters. It also indicates whether the journal is available online, is a peer-reviewed publication and where the journal is indexed.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOA)
Is a free, full text, quality controlled open access index to scientific and scholarly journals.
Citation Analysis
Citation analysis can be used to determine the citation impact of authors, articles, and journals. Beyond basic citation counts, there are measures such as the h-index used to quantify the impact of an individual author.
Journal Impact Factor
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. Find the impact factors of journals using:
Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
for the Sciences and Social Sciences but not for Humanities)
SCR (Scimago Journal and Country Rank)
A free ranking tool for journals with the data from Elsevier product, Scopus. You can limit results by country and geographic region.
For information, check Trent University Library & Archives guide.
Peer review is the process used by publishers and editors of academic / scholarly journals to ensure that the articles they publish meet the accepted standards of their discipline. Peer-reviewed and refereed are synonyms for the same process.
Not all journal articles are peer-reviewed because not all journals are peer-reviewed.
Articles in peer-reviewed journals are reviewed by a group of the writer's peers (other academics in their field) before the articles are published.
You can find out if a journal (and its articles) is peer-reviewed by searching for the journal title in Ulrich's.
The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar.
For example, a scholar with an h-index of 5 had published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times.